The Polish Boxer

"Eduardo Halfon's prose is delicate, precise, and as ineffable as precocious arta lighthouse that illuminates everything."Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name The Polish Boxercovers a vast landscape of human experience while enfolding a search for origins: a grandson tries to make sense of his grandfather's past and the story behind his numbered tattoo; a Serbian classical pianist longs for his forbidden Gypsy heritage; a young Mayan poet abandons his studies to tend his late father's orchard; a university professor yearns for knowledge that he can't find in books and discovers something unexpected at a Mark Twain conference. Drawn to what lies beyond the range of reason, they all reach for the beautiful and fleeting, whether through humor, music, poetry, or unspoken words. Across his encounters with each of them, the narratora Guatemalan literature professor and writer named Eduardo Halfonpursues his most enigmatic subject: himself. Mapping the geography of identity in a world scarred by a legacy of violence and exile, The Polish Boxermarks the debut of a major new Latin American voice in English. Eduardo Halfonhas been cited as among the best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogota and is the recipient of Spain's prestigious Jose Maria de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel. In 2011 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue the story of The Polish Boxer, which is his first novel to be published in English. He travels frequently to his native Guatemala and lives with his wife in Lincoln, Nebraska.